Sherrie > Recent Status Updates

This, exactly:

I return to the manuscript yet again. In addition to money, it represents my connection to practicality. I should be working on it. I know exactly what needs to be done and how to do it. But I don't want to. It's as simple as that. I don't want to. Can I not work? Can I release myself from my own deeply embedded strict schedule...? What will happen if I do?

I would have DNFed this long ago if I didn't feel obligated to review it for a Goodreads giveaway.

This is hard to read. I don't mean it's difficult subject matter but important and will make me a better person for reading it. It's just hard to read so many words so very densely packed and often not speaking to very much. This feels like those late night talks with college friends where after a few drinks you sit up late and rage against everything in your own lives, the country and the world. It just keeps going.

"Monday morning, a blaring alarm jolted Yara awake at twenty past six. She reached for her phone, her fingers mechanically tapping the glass, and shut it off. Twenty-two notifications: eleven emails, two calendar reminders, nine Instagram comments. Already her mind was racing like a browser with too many tabs open, brimming with everything and nothing at once."

This perfectly describes every weekday morning.

Indiana was fast becoming the Alabama of the North. But maybe, some pointed out, it had long been the Alabama of the North, and it was wishful thinking to expect otherwise simply because it was outside the old Confederacy.

I'm finding this slow going, but enlightening.

"By the mid-1920s, there were more Klansmen, per capita, in Oregon than any state but Indiana."

Slow going. Plot is OK, but odd word choices and sentence construction are distracting. A pass by an editor would help this one.

“I am a confused animal who fears the idea of progress, not because I do not wish to progress, but because I fear how those in control define progress.”

Chemist/cooking show host Zott calls table salt and vinegar NaCl and CH₃COOH. When pressed to use a sponsor product:

"Hello, viewers,".... "And welcome back. See this?" She held a soup can close to the camera. "It's a real time saver."

"That's because it's full of chemicals,".... "Feed enough of it to your loved ones and they'll eventually die off, saving you tons of time since you won't have to feed then anymore."

Just out of the gate when I encountered:

"Suddenly, as Rain sat - clearly seething, and the air buzzing with her beauty, the room sizzling with her abruptly evident but frustrated sexual energy - I saw her mother in her."

Rain, BTW, is the narrator's daughter. I fear this is not going to be a pleasant read.

'Were those eight notes familiar to him? Did he recognize them in the least? Why, he would have known them if he hadn't seen them in thirty years and they happened to enter his compartment on a train. He would have known them if he bumped into them on the streets of Florence at the height of the season. In a word, he would have known them anywhere.'

A Tale of Two Cities was one of those classics I long felt I should have read, but had not. The dramatic tale is that good, and the occasional humor enriches the descriptive prose.

Great Expectations will be a re-read, but having reacquainted myself with Mr. Dickens after many years, I think I'll keep going.